The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, attributed responsibility for the 121 deaths in a police operation on Tuesday (28) in Rio de Janeiro to what he called the “barbarism” of the “extreme right” and “Bolsonaro’s Nazis”.
The action aimed to fulfill around one hundred arrest warrants for people linked to Comando Vermelho in the Alemão and Penha complexes. Four of the dead were police officers.
“The pain of the poor. Barbarism is the common denominator of the extreme right, increasingly criminal and Nazi. They believe they can impose order on society by force, massacring”, wrote Petro on X, in a post that featured images of people crying in Rio de Janeiro.
In another post, the left-wing president made reference to Israel’s war against the terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip (currently under ceasefire) and the United States’ military operation against vessels claiming to be drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, which has already resulted in several attacks that have left 61 people dead.
He also accused Rio de Janeiro’s security authorities of being “Nazis” linked to former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL).
“An immense genocide continues in Sudan, the genocide in Gaza. Death spreads across the Caribbean, more from missiles than from the hurricane [Melissa, que atingiu a região nesta semana]; the greatest number of deaths in Latin America is brought by Bolsonaro’s Nazis in Rio de Janeiro. The death-centered anti-crime policy is a complete failure,” wrote Petro.
A People’s Gazette requested a position on Petro’s comments from the Rio de Janeiro Public Security Secretariat, but has not yet received a response. This text will be updated if there is a return. The report is trying to contact Bolsonaro’s advisors.
Last week, together with his eldest son, his wife and his Minister of the Interior, Armando Benedetti, Petro was the target of economic sanctions from the United States, which alleged that the Colombian president allowed drug cartels to “flourish” in Colombia and “refused to stop their activities”.
